Dark Neon: The Neighties
A Micro-Era Invisible to the Cultural Eye
June 10, 1991. My older brother took the TV over for the night. He took the TV over every night. I was six years old. He was 12. I had neither the intellectual nor emotional capacity to have taken in the entire run of Twin Peaks, but this was its grand finale, and it was expressed to me that this was a very. big. deal. My brother dimmed the lights and told me to sit down and shut up like he was a nun in Sunday school. I don’t know where our parents were, probably out at a company dinner (and slowly watching as ufology dissolved their marriage).
My toddler memory is spotty, but my entire world changed once Cooper entered the Black Lodge and the Man From Another Place became his guide in that bizarre space between worlds. “Wrong way!” the backward-speaking dwarf informs him, sending him to freakier and freakier rooms with screaming, white-eyed doppelgangers and dark prophecy spoken in broken fragments. Fumbling in the strobe-lit dark of the Red Room’s labyrinthine halls in his search for the kidnapped Annie Blackburn (played by a still-unknown Heather Graham), Cooper encounters his own doppelganger, who eventually overtakes him and replaces him when he returns to the real world.
Like I said, this changed me at the age of six, shook me down to my psychic core and the visions impressed…
